fact check

The Tampa Bay Times, the paper that puts out (and funds) the supposedly unbiased PolitiFact, has just enthusiastically endorsed President Obama for a second term. The Timeswrites that “[w]ithout hesitation” it “recommends Barack Obama for re-election as president.” The paper cites Obama’s “steady leadership.” It’s no wonder the Times is backing Obama. As its endorsement makes clear, the Times supports Obamacare, the “stimulus,” Dodd-Frank, Obama’s proposed tax hikes, his handling of foreign policy, his handling of immigration, his efforts to redefine marriage, his not being pro-life, and his economic stewardship.

In other words, the Times is a full-spectrum Obama supporter. And we’re supposed to believe that those who write — and rule — for PolitiFact, described in its own words as “a project of the Tampa Bay Times,” are not?

The Times’s gushing endorsement reads like an official publication of the Obama campaign, complete with shameless parroting of a myriad of Obama’s favorite talking points. The Times writes that recovering from “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression” has “proven more difficult than anyone imagined.” However, “conditions would be far worse without the president’s steady leadership,” and this “is not the time to reverse course and return to the failed policies of the past.” Moreover, there have been “31 straight months of job growth, and more than 5 million private sector jobs have been created.”

(Never mind that, according to tallies released by the Obama administration’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics, the portion of Americans over the age of 16 who are employed was 60.6 percent when Obama took office, deteriorated to 59.4 percent by the last month of the recession—in June 2009—and, more than three years into the Obama “recovery,” has now dropped to 58.7 percent—lower than under any other president in the past quarter of a century.)

Of Obama’s $831,000,000,000 debt-financed stimulus (which has been so embarrassingly ineffective that the Obama administration, despite its legal obligation, no longer releases quarterly reports describing its effects), the Times writes that it “stopped the collapse.” The Times adds that repealing Dodd-Frank “would be a mistake and invite the abuses that contributed to the economic crisis.”

As for Obamacare, the Times declares that “Obama’s signature legislative achievement” offers “sweeping health care reform that presidents from both political parties unsuccessfully pursued for decades.” It tellingly adds that Obamacare “is a historic step toward universal health care.”

Moving on to foreign policy, the Times writes that “it took courage to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.” On immigration, it states that Obama “took the initiative” (read: exceeded his legal and constitutional authority) “to let young undocumented immigrants of promise stay in this country legally if they are in school, high school graduates or serve in the military.” (Being a high school graduate now qualifies one as a person “of promise”?) The Times adds, “Any hope for broad immigration reform to keep and attract the best and the brightest regardless of their birthplace lies with the incumbent Democrat.”

Its next line is, “So do prospects for continued progress on civil rights,” including the “right” to have marriage redefined. Still on “civil rights,” the Times praises Obama for “steadfastly support[ing] abortion rights,” while Romney’s election could threaten “a woman’s right to control her own body.”

The New York Times reports today that the "the Obama campaign and Democratic groups have run commercials relating to abortion about 30,000 times since July 2 — about 10 percent of their ads — including one that falsely claimed Mr. Romney’s opposition to abortion extended to cases of rape and incest."

After staring in some amazement at PolitiFact’s ostensibly unbiased rulings on the truthfulness of various statements made during Wednesday night’s presidential debate, I finally realized what the problem is: PolitiFact’s self-described Truth-O-Meter is clearly broken. Thankfully, however, it’s broken in a way that’s both predictable and fixable. You see, if you simply turn the Truth-O-Meter two notches to the right for any claim made by a Republican, and two notches to the left for any claim made by a Democrat, its reading actually becomes surprisingly accurate.

In these pages last week, The Scrapbook noted that a second academic survey had been done suggesting that PolitiFact—the largest of the major media “fact checking” organizations—is biased against Republicans.

From the Scrapbook.

Over the last year or so, the argument has been made many times in these pages that media “fact checking” organizations are a discredit to the journalism profession. Further discrediting the journalism profession at this point is no easy thing to do, yet fact checkers seem more than equal to the task.

From the Scrapbook.

All right, you’re in the Obama White House. You see that the monthly jobs report is terrible, worse than expected. The Federal Reserve is so worried about the economy that it proposes 24/7 pump-priming to jolt it out of the doldrums. A mob invades the United States embassy in Cairo, pulls down the Stars and Stripes, sets it on fire, and raises a jihadist banner in its place. The official response to this desecration is to apologize to the rioters for an anti-Muslim movie trailer that served as a pretext to attack the embassy.

If you missed Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention last week and tried to play catch-up the next morning, you could be forgiven for concluding that nothing the Wisconsin congressman said was true.

Twelve hours after the speech, Josh Marshall, editor of the liberal Talking Points Memo, popular among journalists, asked: “Will the Paul Ryan Lying Thing Break Through in the Mainstream Press?”

Talking Points Memo has a good story about President Obama's latest incident of historical illiteracy at a speech where he got both U.S. and world history wrong in the course of lecturing Republicans about being know-nothings. Here’s a sample, from TPM:

The former Speaker's claims about a government shutdown just don't appear to be true.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is busy scaremongering about the prospect of a government shutdown if the Democrats don't agree to Republican budget cuts:

Closing our government would mean our men and women in uniform wouldn’t receive their paychecks, and veterans would lose critical benefits. Seniors wouldn’t receive their Social Security checks, and essential functions from food-safety inspection to airport security could come to a halt.

During her closing remarks--at which point Republicans didn't have a chance to respond--Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said that John Boehner had misinformed viewers today when he said that there's public funding of abortion in the health care bill:

Leader Boehner, the law of the land is there is no public funding of abortion, and there is no public funding of abortion in these bills. And I don't want our listeners or viewers to get the wrong impression from what you said.

The "law of the land" that bans public funding of abortion, known as the Hyde amendment, would not apply to the health care legislation.

Maybe none.

How many people die from lack of insurance? That's the question that TheAtlantic's Megan McArdle tackled in her column this month. It's a more difficult question to answer than you might think: Though the left is fond of claiming that hundreds of thousands of people will be left to die like dogs on the street if we don't grant them health care coverage, the truth of the matter is still under debate.